Producing Vacations

Who wants a vacation on which the customer brings his own sheets, sleeps in a thatch-roofed hut, goes without electricity, and uses a communal toilet? The 520,000 members of the Paris-based Club Mediterranee, that's who.

This week the club opens for the season five of its 18 summer "villages," mostly scattered around the Mediterranean (one village is far away in the Pacific on Tahiti). It also runs eleven winter ski resorts. Among them, they grossed $16 million, for a profit of $746,870, last year, and the 1966 gross is expected to be $20 million.

What makes the Club Mediterranee a success is its prices, usually less than a traveler on his own would spend on air fare alone. After paying annual $3 dues, a club member can, for instance, go and spend two weeks on the Greek island of Corfu for $210, which is $70 less than the regular round-trip tourist air fare from Paris (an off-season third week is thrown in free). Two weeks at the Djerba, Tunisia, village costs $200. Three weeks in Tahiti costs $1,120--or $660 less than the economy air fare from Paris. Group charter travel, a huge turnover and the unfancy villages make profits at these prices.

Despite the huts and the lack of electricity, club living is far from primitive. Since 400,000 of the members are French, the food is up to first-rate French standards, and without extra cost a member can drink as much wine as he wishes at meals. Also available are sailboats, motorboats, scuba gear, skis and other equipment.

The club was established in 1950 by a onetime Belgian diamond cutter, Gerard Blitz, 54, who got into the business by way of running hotels to rehabilitate concentration-camp victims after the war. Blitz now owns 40% of the club's shares, and Baron Edmond de Rothschild's Compagnie Financiere 34%. In his original prospectus Blitz said the villages would permit members to escape from offices and factories and "rediscover the natural rhythm of life." Club President Gilbert Trigano, 45, takes a less lofty view. Says he: "We look on vacations as a product. We produce vacations just as another firm might produce, say, automobiles."

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